The Michigan Publishing Division of the University of Michigan Library

In order to disseminate e-books effectively, HEB houses and distributes the electronic files through a centralized electronic publishing space. A centralized distribution source, often referred to as an aggregation, can leverage economies of scale by creating one main distribution infrastructure. Thus individual sponsoring publishers and societies need not each develop similar but disparate distribution sources for their own electronic texts.

After carefully reviewing all options, ACLS identified the University of Michigan’s Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) as the most appropriate distributor for this collection, a role later taken over by the University Library’s Michigan Publishing division. The desire to work with Michigan is based both on their experience and on their willingness to serve as a service provider to a consortium of publishers. Since one of HEB’s aims is to assist a spectrum of university presses and other sponsoring publishers in becoming electronically viable, we believe it is wise to rely on one central and neutral distributor from which all participants can draw.

Technical Standards

Michigan Publishing deploys the search mechanisms already developed by DLPS for such projects as Making of America (which includes approximately 50,000 journal articles and 10,000 digitized full-text books) and JSTOR. It has customized its interface according to the designs and functions specified by HEB.

Titles are scanned at high resolution and then converted using multiple, collated OCR (optical character recognition) processes. With its extensive experience in creating and distributing electronic texts, Michigan Publishing works with HEB to develop standards for formatting and advise on the development of the interface, searching, access and usage logging mechanisms for its central publication space, as well as on the development of specifications, production and markup of texts. Michigan Publishing has also worked closely with HEB in implementing the DTD used for its XML-encoded titles.